10B = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
ENTERTAINMENT
THURSDAY. MAY 9, 2002
'Millionaire' producers want to limit airtime
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — With television networks poised to announce their fall plans next week, Michael Davies finds himself in a rare position: a producer begging ABC to keep his show OFF the schedule.
Davies said he wanted to focus viewers' attention on the half-hour syndicated Millionaire that will start in September. Meredith Vieira was named as that show's host on Tuesday.
Davies, executive producer of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, said Tuesday he was lobbying ABC to return the show to its roots as a periodic special aired several nights in a row.
The game show with Regis Philbin as host currently airs twice a week, a mere shadow of the ratings jugernault it once was.
A spokesman for ABC's entertainment division, Kevin Brockman, said executives were in the midst of screening potential new series and wouldn't comment on its scheduling choices. ABC announces its schedule on May 14.
ABC's prime-time struggles may make it hard to grant Davies' wishes. The network has lost about a quarter of its prime-time audience this season and is likely to have a schedule full of holes.
Millionaire represents an easy, inexpensive alternative.
Millionaire averages 10.4 million viewers this season on Monday nights, ranking 42nd among prime-time shows. The Thursday edition averages 9.7 million viewers and is ranked 58th, according to Nielsen Media Research.
That's a stunning drop from the previous season, when the show aired four times a week, each episode averaging 17 million to 20.1 million.
During the 1999-2000 season, three editions of Millionaire were the three highest-rated shows of the year. Each averaged between 27.1 million and 28.5 million viewers a week. ABC was the primetime ratings champ. It's now a distant third to NBC and CBS.
Most critics believe Millionaire sank from overuse, and the tendency to air too many celebrity editions instead of using real people with the chance to make a big score.
All six broadcast networks announce their fall schedules next week, starting with NBC on Monday. Hollywood is filled with anxious producers awaiting the verdicts of network executives.
A handful of once popular shows are on the fence to return next year, including Providence on NBC and Dharma & Greg on ABC.
Performers gather to celebrate composer
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON--They call it Camp Sondheim.The biggest collection of musical-theater performers this side of New York, stage folk who will be spending their summer vacations on the banks of the Potomac River.
"It's like a Who's Who of Broadway," enthuses Michael Kaiser, head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which is producing a four-month salute to composer Stephen Sondheim. Six Sondheim musicals — "Sweeney Todd," "Company," "Sunday in the Park With George," "Passion," "Merrily We Roll Along" and "A Little Night Music" — are being done in repertory through Aug. 25 at the Center's Eisenhower Theatre.
To cast the shows, Kaiser has hired scores of performers, from New York as well as from the local Washington theater scene.
"It it has established a certain esprit de corps — wanting to be part of it," he said.
Kaiser gives a lot of credit to Brian Stokes Mitchell and Christine Baranski, who were the first major performers to sign onto the project. "It made it OK for others to say. 'We'll do it, too,'" he said.
Mitchell and Baranski star in the festival's opening attraction, "Sweeney Todd," he as the vengeful title character, she as Mrs. Lovett, his willing assistant in murderous deeds. Others in the cast include Hugh Panero, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Walter Charles, and Mary Beth Piel.
Baranski, a veteran stage performer best known for her role on
television's "Cybill," has met Mrs. Lovett before, in a concert adaptation in Los Angeles, and she wanted to do the show again.
"I'm glad I did that concert version because I don't think I would have been offered this had not Steve seen me in it in LA," she said. "I mostly don't do musicals."
Mitchell, known for his appearances on Broadway in such shows as "Jelly's Last Jam," "Ragtime," "Kiss Me, Kate" and "King Hedley II," said he always wanted to do "Sweeney Todd."
"It's my favorite musical and I love this role," Mitchell said. "I've sung a lot of Sondheim, but I have never done a whole Sondheim show. This feels like a history-making event, especially doing it here at the Kennedy Center."
A partial listing of the casts for the remaining five shows:
"Company," May 17-June 29: John Barrowman plays perpetual bachelor Bobby. Also in the musical Lynn Redgrave, Emily Skinner, Alice Ripley, Jerry Lanning, Matt Bogart.
"Sunday in the Park With George," May 31-June 28: Raul Esparza, Melissa Errico, Jason Gilbert. Florence Lacev.
"Merrily We Roll Along," July 13-Aug. 24: Michael Hayden, Raul Esparza, Emily Skinner, Anastasia Barzee, Miriam Shor.
"Passion." July 19-Aug. 23:
Judy Kuhn, Michael Cerveris,
Brebcca Luker.
"A Little Night Music," Aug. 2- Aug. 25: Blair Brown, John Dossett, Barbara Bryne, Randy Graff, Sarah Uriate Berry, Natascia Diaz, Danny Gurwin.
Lauryn Hill changes style
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Lauryn Hill was on top of the music world with herlast album."The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" wowed critics, sold 6 million copies, earned five Grammys and influenced an entire school of new soul singers.
Wait till you hear what she's done next.
On her new album, due in stores Tuesday, Hill dramatically changes her style, intersperses songs with sermons and doesn't hide a raspy voice. It instantly becomes one of the most baffling career moves in music history.
When released four years ago, the solo debut by the former member of the rap trio the Fugees was praised for its incisive lyrics and groundbreaking synthesis of rap and soul. It won the 1999 Grammy for album of the year.
The music industry is closely watching to see whether fans view "MTV Unplugged 2.0" as brave or crazy, and whether it torpedoes a promising career.
So MTV was excited last summer when Hill approached with the idea of taping a version of its long-running "Unplugged" series, said Tom Calderone, senior vice president of music and talent programming.
Hill came armed only with an acoustic guitar. She sang none of her hits, instead debuting all new songs in a folk style. She spoke at length about personal and artistic problems between the songs.
MTV aired a one-hour edited version of her performance last week, and its spinoff MTV2 channel has shown the whole thing. The album is an unadorned recording of the entire concert.
Calderone called it a "bold move in a day when album releases and videos are calculated, strategized and analyzed."
Yet the initial critical reaction is mixed, at best.
Jim Farber of The New York Daily News wrote that the disc "sounds as though it should have been called 'Lauryn Hill: Unglued.'"
"She's giving Alanis Morissette a run for her money in the self-indulgence department," Farber wrote. "Both mistake disclosure for revelation, and bald experience for good art. What's missing from Hill's equation are matters like craft and presentation."
USA Today gave the album 31/2 stars out of four, however, with writer Steve Jones praising Hill's courageousness and saying her "willingness to expose herself without the safety net of a supporting band, popular hits or studio wizardry says a lot about the depth of her artistry."
The album includes nine spoken-word interludes. One, where Hill talks about a trip to Disney World, stretches beyond 12 minutes.
The songs generally run long, too. Critic Alexis Petridis in the British newspaper The Guardian wrote that the song, "I Gotta Find Peace of Mind" "would still be going on right now, if Hill had not necessitated its conclusion by suddenly bursting into tears."
Hill is not giving interviews about her work because "she's trying to keep the connection between the music and the listeners as pure as possible," a spokesman said.
Miguel Baguer, a spokesman for Columbia Records, said the label was "more than happy" to release the album. He noted "Miseducation" broke a lot of rules, too.
The album's spoken passages give a road map to Hill's state of mind. "The view is that I'm emotionally unstable, which is reality," she says at one point.
Hill talks about feeling like a prisoner in her own career. It took a long time for her to show the audience the kind of person she really is, she says.
While fans may drift away, they won't desert her, said Emil Wilbekin, editor in chief of Vibe magazine.
New York's 'MoMA' has moved
"People came back to Whitney Houston," he said. "People came back to Madonna. People came back to Cher. People will come back to her."
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — The building, painted a startling blue, is a huge nearly windowless box. In the dreary Queens industrial neighborhood where it stands, the giant blue square is a splash of life in an otherwise gray urban landscape.
A jumble of blocks on the building's roof gives the only hint at what is inside. But you'll need to ride the No. 7 train from Manhattan to see what the blocks spell. A carefully planned optical illusion allows painted lines on the blocks seem to magically align to read "MoMA."
As of June 29, the former factory will be the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, housing one of the world's most famous collections of modern art.
It's very different from MoMAs familiar midtown Manhattan digs, with its leafy sculpture garden and elegant minimalist facade, which will be closed from May 21 until 2005 for a $650 million expansion project.
However, MoMA QNS, as the bright blue box is called, in some ways puts the modern back in the Modern.
"This is probably one of the most exciting things we've done since we were founded," said Glenn Lowry, director of the museum that first opened its doors 72 years ago.
For now, though, the museum is grappling with the daunting task of moving its collection more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings. MoMA also owns some 14,000 films, and 140,000 books and periodicals.
"We're probably talking about ...somewhere near a thousand different trips by truck to complete
the job." Lowry said. "Basically, we're moving almost 24 hours a day. We take advantage of every moment of the day and night."
The move began in early March and is a third of the way done, he said.
Including preparers, curators, registrars, conservators, loaders and others, 50 to 100 people are involved with the move at any given time, said Ramona Bannayan, the museum's director of collections management and exhibition registration.
But not all the works are making the move. Fifteen of the
museum's sculptures have found a temporary home at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Such works as Rodin's "Monument to Balzac" and Giacometti's "Tall Figure III" will stay in Brooklyn until MOA's sculpture garden is again ready to receive them.
Besides direct bus and subway access from Manhattan, a shuttle bus will be available to take visitors from midtown to MoMA QNS and other cultural destinations in Queens.
To help entice visitors over the bridge, MoMA QNS is set to open with three major shows.
"Collection Highlights" showcases MoMA's holdings, including Pablo Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." "Tempo" looks at contemporary art from around the world, and "AUTOBodies" features the newest additions to MoMA's car collection.
The Associated Press
Museum shows Native American art
PALO ALTO, Calif. — When a group of New England explorers set sail more than 200 years ago, they brought back souvenirs from the indigenous people they encountered, hoping to inspire later generations.
Founded in 1799, the East India Marine Society had gathered so many baskets, masks, blankets, headdresses, weapons and other American Indian items that they established a museum in Salem, Mass., 26 years later just to keep it all.
The Peabody Essex Museum now has more than 20,000 pieces in its Native American collection, and can display only a fraction of them — one of several injustices curators of a new exhibit at Stanford University are hoping to counteract.
A hundred items collected from the indigenous peoples of North and South America are included in "Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art From the Peabody Essex Museum," on view through Aug. 11 at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts.
Rarely seen treasures from the 17th through 20th centuries include headdresses of blue and red macaw plumes worn by Brazilian chiefs, and a Chilkat goat wool blanket depicting clan symbols that initially could only be made or worn by wealthy Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest Coast.
The show also tries to erase stereotypes and ethnocentric viewpoints by depicting the everyday lives of Indians a centuries ago, said Tom Haukaas, a Lakota artist from the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota who consulted on the show.
Marine Society members collected pipes, clubs and other symbols of warfare. However, for this exhibit, Haukass and other Indian consultants made a point of including such items as hats, baskets, food ladles and a baby carrier made by Plains tribes in 1850s.
Early marine society members, on the other hand, apparently saw themselves as bold adventurers exploring dark corners of the globe.
One of several early American maritime groups, the society had a unique purpose: form a museum of natural artifacts from beyond the Cape of Good Hope of South Africa and Cape Horn of South America. To be a member, marine men had to sail around both continents.
The seaafarers met inhabitants of the Amazon forests while trading for rubber in South America. Guano and silver trades brought them to Peru, and a need for lumber drew them into northern New England and Canada. The furtrade — particularly sea otter pelts in demand in China — was the attraction in the Pacific Northwest.
The indigenous people soon saw a way to make money off the visitors, creating items solely to be traded, such as human face masks and black argillite smoking pipes made by the Haida, said John Grimes, the Native American Indian curator at the Peabody Essex.
The marine men kept detailed records, although they more often recorded their own feelings than the customs they encountered, said those who have studied their journals.
"We were trying to de-romanticize, to show the breadth of our cultures and still present pieces of great aesthetic appeal," Haukau said. "Reality is sitting at home."
Pregnant?
Birthright can help
1-800-550-4900
FREE AND CONFIDENTIAL
PREGNANCY TESTS
AND REFERRALS